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For many OEMs, there’s no business case for do-it-yourself motion systems
For OEMs like you, hitting your product introduction date is crucial. In fact, metrics have repeatedly shown that the length of time spent developing a product has a greater impact on its success than its costs. Some of the best decisions you can make are those that eliminate time sinks and accelerate product development.
Do-it-yourself motion control systems are notorious time sinks. By requiring your product development engineers to narrow their focus and create their own motion system from scratch, you eat up astounding amounts of time—especially if you’ve got a lean or constantly changing engineering team with limited motion control expertise or if you would prefer to focus on your application rather than on motion control.
Whether you use in-house engineers or hire a motion-control consultant, prototyping, developing, and testing motion algorithms, interfaces, and error handling are big challenges likely to consume six or more months of your team’s time. And until your motion system is developed, your other contributors(electrical, mechanical, and software engineers) can only sit and wait for your first working board to be delivered.
"More and more, advanced manufacturers are learning that the time required to develop a new product has more influence on its success than its costs."
~ Harvard Business Review, "The Return Map: Tracking Product Teams."
Our software, developer kits, and expertise can cut dev time in half. Period.
By using our easy-to-grasp C-based motion language with our ICs, boards, and development suite—instead of building from scratch—you can develop your embedded motion system twice as fast, even when it must be customized.
Robust development suite will simplify and speed up your work
All of our motion board developer kits come with software tools that include state-of-the-art control methodology, analyses, and algorithms. They’re everything you need to get your motor spinning in just minutes.
Pro-Motion® is our easy-to-use Windows-based exerciser and data capture program. It makes motor setup, profile selection, and tuning simple and straightforward, reducing setup time from weeks to hours. Pro-Motion development software offers ready-to-go capabilities your team can share. A step-by-step axis wizard allows designers to quickly and easily tune position loop, current loop, field-oriented control, and other motor parameters. And your software and electrical engineers will be able to verify system performance as soon as the mechanical components are assembled.
Pro-Motion® is our Windows-based development software that allows you to rapidly set up, tune, and test your motion control systems.
"The main thing is we could get to market faster, because [PMD Corp.] allowed us to focus our efforts in other areas and not on trajectory generators, PID loops, [and] motion engine type of things."
~ CTO, Custom Automation Solutions Provider
C-Motion®—user friendly, yet incredibly advanced We’ve invested years of engineering work in the creation, documentation, and continuous improvement of C-Motion—our easy-to-integrate C-based motion language—so you don’t have to. Plus, to make your work easier, we’ve created an extensive library of callable routines and error handlers that provide you with all the source code you need for communicating to our motion processors, boards, and digital drives.
Tested and perfected over years of use and thousands of applications, C-Motion is well documented and works beautifully—with little massaging and no cryptic commands to memorize.
Simple, easy-to-understand motion control command language
Leave no engineer waiting—develop your software and hardware in parallel
Developer kits from Performance Motion Devices are easy-to-use board-and-software packages that dramatically reduce your motion system design time.
When you work with one of our developer kits, your motion algorithm has already been developed for you, so your working prototype is just minutes away. Accompanying manuals provide layout and schematic examples on which to model your own custom board. Plus, you can send Performance Motion Devices your schematics for review. We’re here to help you.
Our developer kits also shrink your development time by enabling your system software and motion hardware engineers to work in parallel. While your hardware team develops your custom board, your software team can develop the system software using our Developer Kit board. We’ll work with you to transfer your finished software solution to a Performance Motion Devices motion control IC, board, or module.
Documentation and support that keeps you moving (and won’t go away)
Employee turnover happens. And when you create your own motion algorithm, one engineer’s moving on can mean your whole team standing still.
When you use technologies from Performance Motion Devices, you have continuous access to our team of application and motion control experts, a common motion language, and world-class documentation. So employee turnover can’t leave you at a standstill.
Motion Control Application Development Timeline
PMD Corp. motion ICs and support tools significantly reduce design time and risk
Empower your team with Common Motion Architecture
All our products share our Common Motion Architecture. This allows your team to use a single motion language and compatible hardware for all your development work, across all machine designs, whether they have 1 axis or 100. Over the long term, that means:
- Streamlined development
- Lower costs
- Less risk
- Staffing flexibility
- Less learning for new applications
- Simpler, easier support
- Low inventory
Get to market faster and stay there—with Performance Motion Devices
To learn more, contact us today.
"Without [Performance Motion Devices] complete motion code, experience, and support, it would have taken us at least two years to develop a similar solution.”
~ Engineering Project Manager, Automated Vision Systems OEM